Politics: Whistleblower: Karl Rove, a top aide to Bush, hailed as whistleblower vs Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame duo, Kerry agents

Mainstream media since their lapdog push for a witless John Kerry's presidential campaign, showed once more their aggregate miscalculation of the wiles of feigners in public office. It all came out when a Bush move (what the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal calls "a punt") to delay a media-induced scandal as a distraction to favour Kerry, resulted in a promise to appoint a Special Investigator who now has produced his investigation, which put one reporter in jail because she wouldn't reveal her source/s.

But the key fact is that Karl Rove, Bush's right-hand aide, blew the whistle on the basis of info he gained from reporters, without knowing either the principal's name or her function as an undercover agent, that Joe Wilson's faked report on Iraq's attempt to buy "uranium ore in Niger" was a set up by his wife who got him hired in the first place. It seems Valerie Plame was a double agent for the Kerry Campaign, while pretending to function in the interests of the US government, undercover of course.

Karl Rove is the person who

warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. [Rove is] the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.

What's more, now both The New York Times and The Washington Post have reversed themselves under the weight of the emerging evidence: Rove had committed "no underlying crime." He merely blew the whistle and went mum, maybe issued a denial because he never had despicable Plame's name until her defenders in the press exposed it. So a denial was in order. The reporters who carried Rove's scrap of info forward also kept mum (including the NYT's Judith Miller who subsequently has gone to prison due to the megalomania of the Special Investigator and the judge who wanted to punish them for outing of the Plame/Wilson combo who conducted their own private disinformation campaign to help the Kerry campaign).

Good on Karl Rove! Shame on Plame and Wilson, separately, and in combo. - Owlb

UPDATE: July 15, 2005, The Washington Post. Valerie Palme's Soap Opera

A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.

"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.

"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."

Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.

In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.

The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."

"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."

Meanwhyld, cut to the US Senate for the antics and anticlimatics of certain Democrats playing snipers out to silence the Whistleblower. - Owlb

UPDATE July 16: Rove emailed security official about talk.

John Solomon writing in San Fransisco Gate points out that the question of a "leak" does not necessarily meet legal requirements for penalty. It depends on several factors.

Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.

"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.

The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove told a grand jury about it last year during testimony in which he also acknowledged discussing Plame's covert work for the CIA with Cooper and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

Rove, however, told the grand jury he first learned of Plame's CIA work from journalists, not government sources.

UPDATE July 18: Bush loses some luster on credibity.

Linda Feldmann writing in The Christian Science Monitor says it's not the Rove thing, since that issue is going to die down until after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report sometime from now, a situation Canadians are famliar with in regard to the Liberal Party's survival of the Gomery Commission's revelations - until mid-Winter when it makes its report. But the similarity of delay is about all that finds any parallel between the two inquiries.

It's not just the recent revelations about top aide Karl Rove - now known to be involved in the imbroglio over the outing of a CIA operative - that have hurt Bush. A range of issues are dampening the president's numbers, from his as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to sell partial privatization of Social Security to increasing public doubts over the decision to go to war in Iraq, says one of the pollsters who conducted the survey.

"We really didn't ask about Rove," says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who ran the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "It's sort of a sense that nothing's going right, and that a lot of his basic tenets that he put out for the second term are coming up a cropper."

Republican analysts don't disagree.

"From a public opinion standpoint, the administration's in a slump," says Charles Black, a Washington lawyer and GOP adviser. "Some accomplishments will help break the slump: If we can get an energy bill and get it signed, get a highway bill and get it signed, if we continue to have a good economy."

On the last point, Mr. Black adds, "it's weird, because the economy is good, but a lot of people don't think it is."

So, it's not the Rove thing, then; and apparently Rove never committed any crime, and there is no accusation that he has - except by partisans who fabricate whatever they can against Bush until it's worn so thin, every fair-minded person can see thru it. As for me, I still very much doubt that Rove broke the law, and that's all that matters in this case. But, more than that, I remain delited that the private anti-government conspiracy of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson has been outed. Until a crime is proven, I thank Karl Rove for that. If Rove committed a crime in the form of a "willful leak" of a former undercover agent who was actually by then above cover according to my understanding, then without approving the alleged crime that was a non-crime, I'm glad the conspirators to defame the President were outed for what they are: manipulative scoundrels. - Owlb